| Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 109 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2856
Category: Book
Authors: Richard C. Hoagland, Mike Bara
Publisher: Feral House
Studio: Feral House
Manufacturer: Feral House
Label: Feral House
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 550
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1932595260
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9781932595260
ASIN: 1932595260
Publication Date: October 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
For most Americans, the word NASA suggests a squeaky-clean image of technological infallibility. Yet the truth is that NASA was born in a lie, and has concealed the truths about its occult origins. Dark Mission documents this seemingly wild assertion. Why is the Bush administration intent on returning to the moon as quickly as possible? What are the reasons for the current ?space race? with China, Russia, even India? Remarkable images reproduced within this book provided to author Richard C. Hoagland by disaffected NASA employees provide clues why, including information about suppressed lunar discoveries. Mystical organizations quietly dominate NASA, carrying out their own secret agendas behind the scenes. This is the story of men at the very fringes of rational thought and conventional wisdom, operating at the highest levels of our country. Their policies are far more aligned with ancient religions and secret mystery schools than the facade of rational science NASA has successfully promoted to the world for almost fifty years. Dark Mission is proof of the secret history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the astonishing, seminal discoveries it has repeatedly suppressed for decades. Richard C. Hoagland is the former science advisor to CBS News, author of The Monuments of Mars, and a frequent guest on the popular radio programs Coast To Coast and The Art Bell Show. Mike Bara is a consulting engineer for Boeing aircraft. This is his first book.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 104 more reviews...
 A silly, completely spurious, false history of NASA November 20, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is a ZERO star book, but Amazon doesn't give that option. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. Better to get a latte and relax with News of the World or some other tabloid. It's not even as believable that the trash at the supermarket checkout!
As a scientist (geologist, geochemist, etc.), I was sent an advance copy of Dark Mission to review for a prestigious national publication. Even though it cost me the fee I would have received for writing the review, I convinced the publication's editor that the book was worthless and not deserving of any review.
I have never received any funding of any kind from NASA.
ALL of Hoagland and Bara's claims about crystalline structures on the moon are spurious. First and foremost, the structures they describe could not survive the continuous impacts of micrometeorites on the lunar surface. There is no atmosphere around the Moon which can protect the surface from the high-speed impacts of space debris, and supposedly abandoned "crystalline towers" which Hoagland and Bara claim are visible in the photos they published in their book would be rapidly pulverized.
The multitude of geochemical analyses which have been conducted on lunar materials by scientists located in laboratories all over the world show that silica (the material that makes glass) is deficient in lunar rocks. If large amounts of manufactured glass had been found on the moon's surface, it would have shown up in the numerous published geochemical analyses of the lunar regolith. Thousands of researchers around the world received and analyzed lunar samples, and if such an anomalous amount of non-natural silica found, the results would have been published and debated in the independent scientific literature.
The irregular pyramidal forms that the authors claim are artificial pyramids in fact are undoubtedly of natural occurence, representing on the Moon remnant impact features (most probably central uplift features) and on the Mars possible glacial features (cirques and similar kinds of structures that one can see in the Alps, in Arctic and Antarctic mountains, and even on Mt. Rainier).
Again, the morphology of geological features is an arcane subject, unfamiliar to the general public. The features of impact structures both on the Moon (where there is no atmosphere or ocean) and on Earth (where both atmosphere and ocean influence the remnant structures of impact features) have been studied intensively. Studies have included laboratory simulations of bullets hitting targets, rocks dropped on sand, and many other experimental models. These studies clearly show that the range of impact features is dependent on the direction of impact (straight up versus at an angle), on the size of the impactor, on the velocity of the impactor, and on the composition (a rocky meteorite vs. a comet, for example).
Anyone who wishes to learn more about this research (which has been conducted over the past 40-50 years) can type "impact structures" into their internet search engine and find more than enough information, including hundreds of references in scholarly journals which are entirely independent of NASA.
Similarly, anyone who wishes to know how the lunar surface has changed over time can type "lunar regolith" into their search engine and be rewarded with dozens of websites and journal titles. Regolith is the "soil" that results from the continuous impact of micrometeorites which reduces the surface matter of a planetary body to a fine-grained sediment.
AT BEST, the material presented in this book can only be called PSUEDOSCIENCE. The features which Hoagland and Bara claim to see in their Mars photos are entirely spurious and frankly rather irrational. In photos of the Martian surface, they claim to see geometrical relationships among these supposed "pyramids" that they claim are proof that the geometry is intentional -- that is, that the structures they connect were built by constructive beings. In fact, the connections they claim to show are meaningless. When one removes all those lines, a sensible geologists sees natural glaciated and/or remnant impact peaks and rims blanketed or partially buried in regolith. That is all they are. The photos do NOT show "buried ancient cities". Only the most desperately deluded can imagine that.
As an independent scientist, I have read dozens of NASA histories and there is much about NASA that can and should be criticized. It is an agency in dire need of fundamental reform. However, there is no secret Nazi hierarchy within NASA that has driven the agency's programs. Nor is there a conspiracy related to Orion or any other distant star assemblage. The lengths to which Hoagland and Bara stretch to make their links between this photo and that photo are in the end hilarious to the scientifically informed reader. The book was, in my opinion, so ridiculous, with so much that is false, inaccurate, and utterly mythological, citing "proofs" that are so fantastic and so unsupported by real data, that no one could or should take it seriously. It is not worth spending money on, and it is certainly not worth the paper and ink required to produce it.
For those whose desire for conspiracies needs factual support, I recommend (highly) two recent books on NASA history:
The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo
Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age
Both of these books provide MORE than enough factual scandal to keep NASA reformers productively busy for years to come.
There is a strange community of people who desperately want to believe that space aliens have visited the Solar System and Earth in the past. This belief is related to their own psychological needs and is not supported by any scientific facts.
My evaluation of Dark Mission is based on being forced to read it after being assigned to review it. It was very hard not to gag. My professional critical conclusion was that it was so false that it was not worthy of a review in a serious publication. It is bunk -- bunkity bunk bunk -- of the worst sort.
 There will always be naysayers November 17, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
It never ceases to amaze me how throughout time, no matter what the subject, no matter what the evidence, there are those who have a mental block to anything other than what our government has told us. I chuckle sometimes, but then realize just how powerful we could be, and how we could eliminate all pain and suffering if we could open our minds to different possibilities. All one has to do, is look at our past, and see how there has always been groups controlling other groups, and while not so in the open today, power still remains the ultimate goal for some. It's at work all around us, so to deny that it exists is to be blind. I could care less about calculations that don't match up...Hoagland's pieces of information fit well into the puzzle of information from other sources. The information that we don't understand today, will become very understandable and clear in the very near future. I hope people will find a way to be more open-minded soon, because those are the people that will hold us back when we will need to join together for the greater good of all.
 Deceiving Title................................... November 11, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
When I saw the title of the book, I was hoping that it would be a more overall history of NASA covering up any UFO information, sightings by astronauts during their flights, etc. While it does very briefly touch on these subjects, most of the contents deals exclusively with the "Face" on Mars, and the so called "City of Cydonia",and crystal structures on the moon, which were supposedly "revealed" in the book by absolutely worthless photos that showed nothing..................
Vast sections of the book are too technical for most readers, who will become restless and skip over whole chapters as I did.
I'm not ruling out the existence of alien structures on Mars or elsewhere, and there eventually might be something to this subject, but this book didn't have it.
Disappointing November 10, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I waited months for the release of this book and was excited when it arrived. However, as I began wading through the pages and pages of technical information, with blurry pictures, and a poorly organized presentation; I finally gave up about half way through the book. While I am extremely open-minded and have no problem accepting some of the concepts (glass structures above the moon), I wish the authors would have hired a good editor to present the information in such a way that a non-scientific person could understand it. Maybe a revised edition could accomplish that.
Bad arguments, tenuous "theories, BAD SCIENCE October 25, 2008
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book is rife with grammatical and spelling errors, which to me is just unprofessional and unacceptable in a published, $25 book. My reaction to Hoagland's writing is that he is an ego-maniac because he thinks that everyone is out to foil his "research" (even other Cydonia research colleagues that disagreed with him) and that his "research" scared THEM so much, that THEY would purposely try to destroy a $300M mission to Mars. Even when NASA gives him the data he wants, there's a conspiracy because it was too convenient and they are trying to confuse the public. NASA is definitely damned if you do and damned if you don't in Hoagland's eyes. His arguments are weak and rely very much on interpretation on the personal level and on flimsy coincidences. His geometric 19.5 deg angles (which he highly focuses on in the book) drawn on images of Cydonia can be any angle from 15-21 deg depending on where you choose to have vertices on the "Face" and the "D&M Pyramid" (pg. 388). He mocks other Cydonia research teams because they had totally "absurd scientific position(s)" that weren't at all different than any position he had earlier in the book; just in this case he saw it a different way ("Letters from Mars", pg. 312).
Here is one big inaccuracy that highlights the either misleading or just incompetent nature of Hoagland's arguments: Figure 4-45 on page 198 (also repeated as color Figure 6). The actual graph shows the ABSORBANCE vs. the wavelength of light for a gold film, yet Hoagland just renames the graph as the "Gold Film Spectral TRANSMISSION Curve". Absorbance and transmission are two opposite phenomena (i.e. the higher the absorbance of a material (A), the lower its transmission (T), specifically A = log(1/T) ). Hoagland states that NASA "claims" that a gold coating is used on the astronauts' glass visor on their helmets to protect astronauts from UV light. Well, this is exactly what the gold coating does as it has high absorbance in the UV range (i.e. low transmission of UV light). But because Hoagland incorrectly interpreted the graph as "Transmission", he argues that the gold coating actually "enhances" UV light to allow the astronauts to better see the UV scattered light off of the Moon's "glass ruins". Hoagland can't even get basic scientific terminology right; or he is being deliberately misleading. However, I believe he just doesn't understand, because if he was trying to be misleading he wouldn't be too smart for leaving the absorbance axis labeled that way in the published figure.
This book, while having some interesting pictures and somewhat entertaining explanations (as in, "what is this guy smoking?"), was a complete waste of time. It left me frustrated, because I've seen so many people willing to take Hoagland's evidence as hard scientific fact; I fear for the intellectual future of society. But, if you're the die-hard conspiracy believer, nothing I can point out will stop you from your belief that "they are hiding something". As they say, you can't convince a conspiracy theorist that the sky is blue, even if they were looking straight up on a clear, sunny day. Please, just don't drag respectable science down.
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